Scene

Strange powers

-
0

› johnny@sfbg.com

Witch! The accusation — or is it rallying cry? — that slices through Goblin’s pounding score for Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria is newly pertinent. Witchery reigns within strains of black metal and the long-awaited third chapter in Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy (which began three decades earlier with Suspiria), this summer’s invigoratingly zany naked bloodbath Mother of Tears. It’s tempting to credit film curator Joel Shepard with a sorcerer’s clairvoyance, because the "Witchcraft Weekend" he has programmed for the screening room at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is so damned prescient.

The centerpiece of "Witchcraft Weekend"<0x2009>‘s imaginatively and near-immaculately selected quartet of movies — the dark void or blinding light around which the other three orbit — is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 Day of Wrath. I’ll be brazen enough to admit that my first encounter with this masterpiece occurred one evening while flipping channels, when its flaming dramatic core — a harsh counterpoint to the heroic final stakes of his peerless 1927 The Passion of Joan of Arc — flickered before my eyes and basically branded my psyche (and soul?) for eternity. There are few scenes in cinema as bluntly harrowing as the demise of accused witch Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier): her defiance and her fear of death — but not of God — rage as forcefully as the man-made inferno that consumes her.

Day of Wrath might be the most quietly terrifying or suspenseful art film ever made (though it shouldn’t be blamed for the form’s current crimes against patience or intelligence), because Dreyer seamlessly connects realism with a deeply ambiguous understanding of spirituality and fate. That is no small achievement, and one that’s been increasingly rare with the passage of time. The fate of Herlofs Marte is evident from the film’s first scene, where she hands herbs from a gallows garden to another woman, stating, "There is power in evil." Seconds later the bells begin to toll for her and — thinking of a past secret — she flees to seek refuge in the household of Absalon (Thorkild Rose); his bear of a mother, Marte (Sigrid Neiiendam); and his young wife, Anne (Lisbeth Movin), who seems to possess strange powers.

In the feline, fiery-eyed Movin, Dreyer finds this lonelier film’s answer to Falconetti from The Passion of Joan of Arc: in other words, an actor whose face becomes (to paraphrase André Bazin quoting Béla Balasz) a timeless and more ambivalently transcendent "document." Critics have pointed out Day of Wrath‘s abundant visual similarities with Italian Renaissance and Flemish painting, particularly the works of Rembrandt (James Agee went so far as to point out one sequence’s resemblance to Rembrandt’s 1632 Lesson in Anatomy), and Bazin is intuitively and perhaps more insightfully correct in invoking the film’s influence on Robert Bresson’s equally classic 1951 Diary of a Country Priest. But it takes Pauline Kael to sympathetically hone in on the feminine "erotic tensions" of what she deems "the most intensely powerful film ever made on the subject of witchcraft." As she puts it, "Dreyer dissolves our terror" as characters are "purified beyond even fear." But the sense of fear and terror he instills is purer than that engendered by the horror genre’s gleeful scare tactics.

"Witchcraft Weekend"<0x2009>‘s trio of other films steer clear of Blair Witch and Harry Potter terrain as well as the easy, if extremely enjoyable, kitsch of Teen Witch (1989) or The Craft (1996) to explore and connect less obvious instances of celluloid sorcery. In a manner that magnifies the resonance of Day of Wrath‘s austere use of black and white, Shepard brings in a pair of contrasting Technicolor sights: the Queen or Witch (spine-chillingly vocalized by Lucille La Verne) from 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the scorpio-rising bikini sacrifices of William O. Brown’s 1969 cult obscurity The Witchmaker. The program’s series of spells begins with the wicked Witchcraft Through the Ages, a 1968 abbreviated revision of Benjamin Christensen’s energetically episodic 1922 silent work Häxan, featuring a frenetic and playful jazz score by Jean-Luc Ponty and mordantly misogynist narration by William S. Burroughs. *

WITCHCRAFT WEEKEND

Thurs/23–Sun/25

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Yo, bangerz: Come get some

-
0

I meant to have posted this banger love letter yesterday, but I got caught up in gay marriage drama (did anyone else think the music at the Castro celebration party last was a bit dark for the occasion? Celebrate equal rights with psytrance! I kinda had to love it … )

So I’ve jabbered on and on about the banger scene, and about the tecktonik dance that goes with it (in Europe, at least) — but what about the music and the clubs, eh? Yeah, we’ll get to that, but first here’s the vid for the new N.E.R.D. song that’s everywhere — it’s pretty much an acoustic banger, heh — and the electro remixes are already flowin’ in. It’s a scandalously dead-on look at the scene, and I guess when I said that goofy over-accessorizing was out I misspoke, but I still can’t find any irony.

And now, click here for this bangin’ mix from one of my favorite people right now — and a damn good DJ — Richie Panic, called “An Amazingly Lifelike Companion.” listen especially for the “Bonus Track” — kiddie mosh-pit indeed. And an excellent example of the punk roots, or at least aspirations, of the scene.

And then check out 22-year-old local banger Public’s jaw-dropping mixtape of his own edits (Metallica! ELO! The Cardigans! “The Promise”?!) — I figure we’ll be hearing a lot more from this one.

As for clubs, kind-of weekly Blow Up at Rickshaw Stop is the epicenter right now, with its sister club Frisco Disco right behind (although Frisco Disco keeps it a little more old-school neon indie, with more actual guitar-driven songs from the past and even a little melancholy.) Here’s a couple vids from Blow Up — there’s a hot one tonite if you can make it — shot by Blow Up’s videographer Peter Noble, because no club would be anything without impeccable digital documentation. Noble’s editing technique is pretty rad, though.

She sang, he filmed

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Perhaps you’d like a dark date with Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Bysshe Shelley. If not, you can always opt for a purple romp with Rimbaud and Verlaine, or Gertrude and Alice, or Paul and Jane Bowles. Maybe you have an ear for rock, in which case you can hit the bed or hit a vein with John and Yoko, or Sid and Nancy, or Kurt and Courtney. Really, what doesn’t fascinate us about legendary bohemian couples of various eras? They’re like Brangelina, but with a more thesis-friendly shelf life for anyone aspiring to a liberal arts degree.

We fetishize intersections between artists in any influential boho scene, from the Symbolists and the Dadaists to the Beats. Whether those bohos are hippies or punks, their brief encounters heighten each other’s retrospective glamour. Andy Warhol might be the all-time champ at making every minor contributor into a cult figure. One woman provided a bridge between the Warhol Factory and the fertile Euro boho scenes of the 1960s and ’70s. That woman was Nico (birth name: Christa Päffgen), the ethereally gorgeous model-actor turned avant-chanteuse who could transform anything — a sweet Jackson Browne ballad or one of her own inimitable compositions — into a postapocalyptic dirge.

The camera may have loved Nico, but that sentiment went unrequited. After she appeared in a few films, including 1966’s Chelsea Girls, and onstage as part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour, Lou Reed dumped her, the Velvet Underground didn’t want her, and MGM Records realized the record-buying public enjoyed listening to this bleating beauty even less than they did the variably twee, glum, cacophonous, and not yet desert island–ready V.U.

Thus, this Germanic grievous angel slunk back to the continent from whence she came, leaving behind a list of ex-lovers that purportedly included Jim Morrison, John Cale, Brian Jones, Tim Buckley, and Iggy Pop. Once there, she fell in with a heady Parisian counterculture — in particular, with the filmmaker Philippe Garrel.

The film series "I’ll Be Your Mirror: Rare Films by Philippe Garrel" cuts a swath through Nico’s and Garrel’s enduring dual magnetism, a connection that endured long after her 1988 death from a cerebral hemorrhage. Ten years her junior, Garrel was barely out of his teens when he met Nico, yet he was already finishing his fourth feature, La Lit de la Vierge. She contributed the song "The Falconer" to that film’s ripe slice of 1969 Maintenant Génération angst, which was heavily dosed on post–May 1968 disillusionment and LSD.

A look at Morocco through a black-and-white CinemaScope viewfinder, La Lit de la Vierge is characteristic of Garrel’s hard-to-find (and hard to watch, some might say) early films. It’s visually striking, madly pretentious, and a perfect time capsule of a particular cultural moment’s entwined adventure and humorlessness. Scrawny and sporting a Prince Valiant ‘do, Pierre Clémenti is the film’s hippie Jesus, who rides into town on a burro only to be knocked off his humble ride by bullies. This Jesus has some real Oedipal issues, and no wonder — the actress Zouzou (Danièle Ciarlet) plays both Mary and Mary Magdalene. In case you can’t tell by now, there won’t be a Second Coming: when Christ makes an exit, it’s to get the hell away from people.

Nico appeared in virtually all of Garrel’s subsequent movies up until their decisive 1980 split. The fallout from their less-than-healthy relationship resonates through his more conventional later efforts, perhaps most blatantly within 1991’s I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore. In that film, Marianne (Johanna ter Steege; cute, but lacking Nico’s goddess quality) is a maddening object of desire who abandons lovers after dragging them into her heroin-addicted spiral. "I love you like a madman," declares Garrel’s stand-in Gerard (Benoît Régent). "That means the day you cease to be crazy, you won’t love me anymore," she snaps. Later, when talking to Gerard’s stable new squeeze, Marianna seems to speak for the director and his late muse when she ponders, "Maybe I didn’t make him happy, but it was a different era. Maybe we didn’t need to be happy. We were seeking something else."

Guitar‘s posthumous portrait is more repellent than alluring. But to help the unconverted fathom Nico’s peak mystique, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts film curator Joel Shepard has also programmed The Velvet Underground and Nico, an hour-long 1966 performance directed by Warhol. Static and chaotic, it features Nico on tambourine, with little Ari (her son by Alain Delon), a noise-jamming V.U., Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga a-go-go, and a bout of performance interruptus courtesy of the NYPD. At the box office, up until 2005’s Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel couldn’t get arrested. But outside of it, the types he hung with always could.

I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR: RARE FILMS BY PHILIPPE GARREL

Thurs/15–Sun/18, $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Yo, bangerz

-
0

Also in this issue:

Rave it tecktonik: Hard electro’s dance du jour

Bang! The clubs, the music, the mixes

Super Ego Must the French rule everything? Is Justice revenge for "freedom fries"?

Anyone who’s recently squeezed themselves into a sliced-up silver Lycra T-shirt, pushed down a pair of Day-Glo Cazals, baby-oiled their coke-spoon anklet charms, and hit the city’s glitzier underground dance floors in the past year knows that the hardcore electro sound of Paris’s laptops — lahptoops? — is everywhere they wanna be. So yeah, this shout-out to the trenchant trend is late, and the French are already being usurped by English, Aussie, and American glam-tech innovators. But I’ve got hungry drag queens at home to feed. Mama can’t afford no glittery off-the-shoulder neon silk-screen slip dry-cleaning bills.

Also, it’s taken a while for the scene to coalesce into something tangible, nightlifewise. "Electro" has always been a catch-all — as long as it emanates from adorably entangled circuitry, the genre’s sound swings wildly from lowdown industrial grind to straight-up booty smack, vocoded howl to shuddering fwump to skittery blizzard of blips. It took French duo Justice, along with a slew of other big-name like-mindeds like MSTRKRFT and Simian Mobile Disco, to crystallize some of electro’s recent, disparate past — amped-up electroclash guitars, nu-rave airhorn screech, Philly and Baltimore cybernetic cartoon sexuality, bubbly London champagne rave, and triple-filtered Daft Punk euro strip-down — into the rock-candy party sound still blowing out woofers all over town, launching a genuine style. At first dismissed as mere Daft Punk knockoffs, these earnest Ableton addicts have transformed electro into this house generation’s gleaming hair metal, complete with fussy headbands, flashing tits, and on occasion, what my bf Hunky Beau terms "the most well-scrubbed mosh pits ever."

The scene is called banger — as in Ed Banger, Justice’s Paris-based label. The sound? Warped arena rock grandeur ripped asunder by fuzzy needles, taut bass arpeggios, pounding 808s with cymbal-crash breakdowns (they’re back!), dirty childlike vocals, and anarchic Prodigy posing to — cover your ears, discriminating queens — pop-rave 2 Unlimited keyboards. Banger kids arrive stripped of quotation marks (excessive goofy accessorizing and ironic retro bombast are out), fronting the tight sheen of perfect online shopping technique, 24-inch waists, Rockstar and rye on tap, wanton pantomimed sex, and a tang of American Apparel ennui. ("I’m on the club soda diet," a model confided matter-of-factly outside one bangin’ banger club. "I need to go to the bathroom and meditate for a minute before I pass out.") If all this sounds more like "da club" then the club, well, that’s the delicious line of tension bangers like to play against.

Banger style has even given rise, in Paris at least, to a dance craze (also back!) called tecktonik. Have you seen this shit? It’s electroclash break dancing — a splash of rave liquid by way of circuit fan–twirling, coupled with random Adderall withdrawal jerks. "Tecktonik" is now a brand-name T-shirt and a haircut, of course.

The above may look iffy on paper, but it works — there’s a blinding energy to the scene, and I’m held positively rapt by some local bangers. My next column will feature a few, as well as some young upstarts taking the bang into fidgety new directions. Let’s riot.

Poesia

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

Since my Italian is limited to a few cuss words plus "prego," I was not able to follow the ins and outs of the Italian film being shown, Foreign Cinema–style, on the rear wall of Poesia, a lovely restaurant opened by Francesco D’Ippolito in March in one of the Castro’s most haunted locales. The movie looked like a close relation of The Dick Van Dyke Show, to judge by the costuming and black-and-white cinematography, and it lacked both sound and subtitles — not necessarily a huge loss for Anglophone diners who prefer to keep their attention trained on their dinners and on one another, instead of on the movie’s progress and whether or not the actors are swearing in Italian.

The movies at Foreign Cinema generally include subtitles and are not limited to Italian provenance. In these respects, Poesia is a not-quite-direct descendant of that highly successful, highly atmospheric Mission District restaurant. Nonetheless, the new place’s ancestry is plain. It’s also welcome, and I speak as someone who resists the multimedia antics that make too many restaurants too stimuutf8g to be pleasant these days. Poesia’s second-story digs, across the street from the venerable Midnight Sun, have recently been home to Ararat and La Mooné, a pair of worthy ventures that seemed to get lost in the Castro shuffle. This can happen when people can’t easily find you. A staircase is a slim sidewalk presence for any restaurant. So, sweeten the deal with a movie! Screen it, and they will come.

And if they come hungry, all the better. Poesia’s food is rich in friendly elegance and would be worth seeking out even without a cinematic enticement. It also reminds us that classic Italian cooking doesn’t (on the one hand) need tinkering with but (on the other) does accept flourishes, even California-style ones, without losing its essential honesty. I particularly liked the glasslike slivers of flash-fried green garlic that served as a bed for a trio of arancini ($6), risotto fritters aromatic with a stuffing of smoked mozzarella cheese. Once the arancini were gone, it was as if we’d been transported to the scene of an auto break-in, with shards of translucent green all over the place. The arancini themselves were sensually, addictively creamy, though short-lived. But we found ourselves nibbling at the green garlic as a satisfying coda.

Fennel root (finocchio) has been a player in Roman Jewish cooking for two millennia, and it clearly matters to Poesia’s kitchen too, at least at this time of year, the crest of the season of roots. The bulbs turned up quartered, breaded, and lightly fried ($7) as an appetizer — a kind of frito misto without the misto — and, shredded, in a salad ($7.50) tossed with arugula leaves and mandarin-orange sections and dressed with a blood-orange vinaigrette. Fennel root is often mentioned as an interesting substitution for celery, but these two dishes, whether considered separately or juxtaposed, suggest that it’s far more than a stand-in for a simple staple.

If not finocchio, then radicchio — the claret and white chicory leaves with the bitter edge — which turned up as a bed for a sophisticated seafood salad ($14). The seafood consisted of peeled shrimp, sea scallops, squid, clams, and mussels, simmered in a marinara sauce and laid atop the radicchio, whose leaves had been softened and made less sharp by braising. And since finocchio and radicchio need not be mutually exclusive, the plate (a long and narrow rectangle like a sushi platter) was finished with a salad of intertwined carrot and fennel-root ribbons at the far end.

Veal is among the most ethically problematic of meats — the calves it’s obtained from are largely a consequence of the none-too-pretty dairy industry (only pregnant cows lactate) — but it’s also mild-flavored and sublimely tender and buttery if handled with care. At Poesia the sautéed medallions ($19) were bathed in a pizziaola sauce, a puree of tomatoes charged with garlic, oregano, and hot pepper, and dotted with halves of pitted black olives. The rest of the dish was finished simply, with quarters of roasted new potato and heap of sautéed broccoli rabe, dark green and glistening.

Desserts, like the savory courses, are variations on classic themes. Tiramisù is beyond cliché now, but Poesia’s version ($7) uses Grand Marnier, for a hint of oranginess, and it doesn’t have the typical tiramisù’s sloppy-lasagne-square look but instead resembles a striped lampshade. Cannoli ($7) is more conventional in appearance — a flute of crisped pastry — and is filled with chocolate chip–studded whipped cream, while an honor guard of strawberry slices stand at attention to one side.

The restaurant’s layout remains unchanged from earlier incarnations. There is a bar in a cozy corner, but you can’t watch the movie if you’re sitting at it: bad angle. The dining-room windows still offer a commanding view of a festive block of 18th Street, although the windows’ bareness is disconcerting. People peeking out from on high at passersby prefer a bit of cover, some curtains or drapes or even miniblinds. I speak from some personal experience on this point. Window treatments also relieve starkness, as experienced from inside. But it’s early, and perhaps D’Ippolito will get to such matters at some point.

He’s a busy man, though, working the dining room, supervising the service staff, and offering customers the occasional tutorial in conversational Italian or Italian film history. I tried out a few of my swear words, and they met with nods of approval, even if we both knew we weren’t dealing in poetry.

POESIA

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–11 p.m.

4072 18th St., SF

(415) 252-9325

www.poesiasf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noise under control

Not wheelchair accessible

Allen Oldies Band

-
0

PREVIEW The Allen Oldies Band delivers a reckless tornado of classic hits, a retro dance party of Sham-tastic proportions. But don’t make the mistake of considering this Austin, Texas, ensemble a mere cover band. The Oldies have amassed a cult following built on the strength of a talented group of classic session players, sprinkled with a heavy dose of punk-pit sensibility. They have punctuated the beginning of South by Southwest in their hometown with an infamous 9:30 a.m. breakfast shindig replete with French maids serving jalapeño pancakes. They will play literally anywhere — but they will not play just anything. From "Wooly Bully" to "It’s Not Unusual," the Oldies are resolute in their mission to bring the dance tunes of yesteryear to your doorstep.

Allen Hill dreamed up this raucous, plaid-blazer-clad army of fun. Hill is a bit of a musical raconteur, a de facto spokesperson for the retro Austin scene who fronts his own combo with feverish enthusiasm and wisecracks. Wearing a tuxedo and tennis shoes, Hill rushes from one end of the stage to the other, employing a tongue-in-cheek goofiness with the group and the audience, recalling Louis Prima at his best. Always looking to spread the message of party rock, the Oldies are no strangers to either the wedding or corporate event circuit — please book three months in advance — and have played backing ensemble to the likes of Chuck Berry and Archie Bell. Lest their paying gigs sound too staid, the Oldies have the indie cred of a live WMFU album, Live and Delirious (Freedom, 2006). While their trips outside the Lone Star State are not as frequent as their fans would like, they are finally set to grace our fair city with a dose of hyperactive twistin’ tunes.

ALLEN OLDIES BAND With the Barbary Coasters. Fri/16, 9:30 p.m., $6.
Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

Big and getting Gigantour

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

In a few days, a legion of heavy metal maniacs will throng the Event Center at San Jose State University for the third annual Gigantour. Created by Megadeth frontperson Dave Mustaine, the package consists of bands he has handpicked for their ability to deliver high-energy live sets to arena-size crowds. In addition to the venerable thrashers in Megadeth, the tour has included a number of the biggest names in both modern and classic metal such as Lamb of God, Anthrax, Overkill, and Opeth.

The 2008 incarnation of Gigantour has tapped Bay Area greats High on Fire, who seem to be playing in front of bigger audiences with each passing week, and given the youthful Arizonans in Job for a Cowboy their first taste of the big time. While American metal is robustly represented, Mustaine has also called on two European bands that are legendary in their own countries. Subsumed by the banner of Megadeth, Sweden’s In Flames and Finland’s Children of Bodom are holding down the kind of opening slots that have become unfamiliar to them, promoting new albums to each other’s fans and trying to reach that ever-elusive next echelon of success.

In Flames guitarist Jesper Strömblad sounded weary but enthusiastic when reached by phone from Worcester, Mass., where he was preparing to play the first day of the New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, which included the entire Gigantour lineup on its initial night. The group was honored to join the outing, he said, adding, "Megadeth is one of my personal favorite bands."

In Flames was formed by Strömblad in 1990 in Gothenburg, Sweden, a university town that during the ’90s hosted a profusion of melodic death metal, honed into a form so distinctive that it became known as the "Gothenburg sound." Typified by carefully composed neoclassical guitar harmonies, the style was popularized by bands such as At the Gates, Dark Tranquillity, and Soilwork (from nearby Helsingborg), but it reached a creative peak on In Flames’ 1996 full-length, The Jester Race (Nuclear Blast).

In Flames’ new A Sense of Purpose (Koch) hasn’t lost the searing dual leads that define the group, and as Strömblad was right to point out, "You can hear a song from today’s In Flames, or an old song — you can hear it’s us." Creatively, however, the band has been caught in a downward spiral since 2002’s Reroute to Remain (Nuclear Blast), which introduced clean singing, slower tempos, and hollow electronic textures into the band’s repertoire. As Strömblad explained, "playing fast is not necessarily aggressive, or heavy. What we want to put in the music is big dynamics." Those musical contrasts are present, but accompanied by stark differences in quality between the outfit’s modern and classic material.

While In Flames has evolved, Finnish outfit Children of Bodom has mostly stuck to its guns, churning out adrenaline-fueled speed-metal full of catchy neoclassical shredding on the keyboard and guitar. Founded in 1993 in Helsinki, the band takes its name from Lake Bodom, a small body of water in the city’s suburbs that was host to the country’s most infamous triple murder, which claimed the lives of three teenagers on a camping trip in 1960.

The group’s frontperson, Alexi Laiho, is a veritable guitar hero, in addition to being an unrepentant party animal. Finally reached by phone in Baltimore after an initial hangover-thwarted attempt, he insisted that Children of Bodom’s daunting technicality was a natural outgrowth of his songwriting, rather than an attempt to show off. The band’s greatest strength is clear when Laiho and keyboardist Janne Wirman chase each other up and down the scales, and Children of Bodom, at its best, sounds like a demented, amplified string quartet. No surprise, then, when Laiho mentioned the artist the combo listened to for inspiration when recording its groundbreaking early albums: "Mozart."

Children of Bodom’s new Blooddrunk (Spinefarm) certainly cites the ax-master’s love of booze and is a more memorable effort than 2005’s Are You Dead Yet? (Spinefarm). The solos are as incendiary as ever, and the band’s embrace of progressive-rock tendencies has yet to blunt the Vivaldi-style virtuosity of its songs.

Speaking with two bands that have ascended to the metal mountaintop and gotten a look at the downward slope on the other side, it seemed important to ask if this new period of prosperity, exemplified by Gigantour, had a catch. After all, metal has fallen on hard times before, even when it seemed poised to conquer the world for good.

Surprisingly, Strömblad and Laiho provided nearly identical answers. "You always see different styles [of metal]," said the In Flames guitarist. "The genre of metal will always be popular. The different styles can grow big for a while and then go away." Laiho concurred: "Because the metal scene is so big and wide, and has different categories, it’s never going to implode on itself. It’s always going to be evolving." As long as people in Sweden, Finland, and America are willing to forge the next In Flames or Children of Bodom, these two six-string titans will be proven right.

GIGANTOUR

With Megadeth, In Flames, Children of Bodom, Job for a Cowboy, and High on Fire
Mon/19, 5:30 p.m., $37.50

San Jose State University, Event Center Arena

290 S. Seventh St., San Jose

www.ticketmaster.com

The Bike Issue: Behind the pack

-
0

Also in this issue:

>>10 things Bay Area cyclists should know

>>Don’t Stop: Bike lessons from Idaho

› steve@sfbg.com

There’s a strange dichotomy facing bicycling in San Francisco, and it’s spelled out in the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s "2007 Citywide Bicycle Counts Report," which features a cover photo of Mayor Gavin Newsom and me pedaling up Market Street together on Bike to Work Day two years ago.

That photo, its context, and the information contained in the report tell the story of a city that at one time set the pace for facilitating bicycling as a viable alternative to the automobile. But that city has been passed up since then by cities such as Chicago, New York, Washington DC, Seattle, and Portland, Ore.

San Francisco still has a higher per-capita rate of bicycle use than any major city in the United States, and that number has been steadily rising in recent years, even as construction of new bike facilities has stalled. The report’s survey found a 15 percent increase since the first official bicycle count was conducted in 2006.

"This increase is especially significant when viewed in light of the injunction against the City’s Bicycle Plan. This injunction has stopped the City from installing any new bicycle facilities since June 2006. Despite a lack of improvement or additions to the City’s bicycle route network, cycling use in San Francisco appears to be increasing," the report read.

It’ll take at least another year for city officials to wrap up the environmental studies on the 56 proposed bike projects and get Judge Peter Busch to lift the injunction (see "Stationary biking," 5/16/07). But it’s still an open question whether San Francisco’s three-year hiatus will be followed by the rapid installation of new bike lanes and other facilities.

City officials express confidence, and there are some hopeful signs. Newsom has been focused on environmental initiatives, the MTA has beefed up its bike staff from six full-time slots to nine, advocacy groups like San Francisco Bicycle Coalition are at the peak of their numbers and influence, and all involved say promoting bicycling is a cheap, effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and traffic congestion.

"I’d be very surprised if, within six months after the injunction being lifted, we don’t see a record number of bike lanes striped," said MTA spokesperson Judson True.

Yet there are still political barriers to overcome in a city where cars are the dominant transportation option — and the first barrier is Mayor Newsom. He has yet to show a willingness to back his green rhetoric with policies that actually take space from cars, which many of the bike lane projects will entail.

"I think we have seen this mayor talk big on some environmental problems, but I’ve been disappointed that on transportation, that thinking hasn’t been turned into action yet," said SFBC executive director Leah Shahum, whom Newsom appointed to the MTA board but then removed earlier this year before her term expired, a sign of the complex and largely adversarial relationship between the mayor and bicyclists.

Newsom has been able to avoid tough decisions on bikes and cars for the past two years because of the injunction and the wait for Muni and traffic congestion studies, which are being released throughout 2008. But that’s about to change with the court’s ban on new bike projects slated to end next year. So will Newsom, who may be running for governor at the time, be willing to make controversial decisions that back up all his green talk? It’s an open question.

The common denominator in all the cities that have pedaled past San Francisco in recent years is that they’ve had strong mayors who have embraced cycling and partnered with bike advocates to change the rules of the road, often contracting them to work directly on projects.

"We’re poised for it, but will we act on it?" Shahum said of the potential for a bike boom in San Francisco. "It’s going to be a real test next summer and I think the mayor’s role is crucial."

THE GREEN BUG


Like many big city mayors, Newsom has become enamored of all things green at the same time that he’s trying to manage an overtaxed transportation system. He is pushing for Muni improvements and has voiced support for congestion pricing initiatives that could make driving a car more expensive.

"This trend of big city mayors focused on transportation to deal with environmental problems is spreading, and I think Newsom has caught that bug," Shahum said.

SFBC and other groups have been meeting regularly with Wade Crowfoot, the mayor’s new director of climate change initiatives, to push the bike plan work forward, create an aggressive implementation strategy, and craft new initiatives like the recently unveiled "Healthways" proposal to close down the Embarcadero to cars on summer Sunday mornings, an idea borrowed from Bogotá, Colombia.

It’s a sea change from that ride I took with Newsom two years ago, three days after he vetoed Healthy Saturdays, which would have created another day of car-free roads in Golden Gate Park. He labeled the bike advocates as "divisive," and told me his veto decision was influenced by "people in the neighborhoods who just came out in force in ways that, frankly, I didn’t expect."

Those feelings, held by the half of San Franciscans who use a car as their primary mode of transportation, haven’t gone away. Newsom’s advisers and the MTA staffers working on the Bike Plan acknowledge the political challenges in completing the bike network, which advocates say is an important prerequisite for convincing more people that cycling is a safe, attractive option.

I asked Oliver Gajda, who is leading the MTA’s bike team, whether the 56 projects he’s now working on would be queued up and ready to build once the injunction is lifted. While the technical work will be done, he said that most projects still will require lots of community meetings and negotiations.

"Some of the projects will take a couple years of work with the community, and some will take less," Gajda said. "When you discuss the potential of removing lanes or parking spots, there are lots of different interests in San Francisco that have concerns."

That’s where the rubber meets the road. Yes, everyone wants to see more cycling in San Francisco — Newsom two years ago even set the goal of 10 percent of all vehicle trips being made by bicycle by 2010, a goal that nobody interviewed for this article thinks the city will meet — but is the city willing to take space from cars?

"The public priorities are already correct, but we need political leadership to implement those priorities even when there’s opposition," said Dave Snyder, transportation policy director with the San Francisco Planning Urban Research Association.

Crowfoot said Newsom is committed to creating better alternatives to the automobile.

"The mayor is fully supportive of expanding the bike network and that will involve tradeoffs," Crowfoot said, acknowledging that some projects involve losing lanes or parking spaces to close the bike network’s most dangerous gaps. "To the extent that the bike network continues to be a patchwork, people won’t get on bikes."

But the mayor also has been fully supportive of the Transit Effectiveness Project’s proposal to reform Muni, even though he recently suggested opposition to proposed parking fine increases might mean that some TEP proposals need to be scaled back.

Skeptics also note that Newsom removed Shahum from the MTA and has appointed no one else with connections to the bicycling community since then, even though that body has sweeping new authority under last year’s Proposition A to implement the bike plan and make decisions about which transportation modes get priority and funding.

"I’m pushing for that, and we’ll see what happens," Crowfoot said of his efforts to get a complete bike network going during the Newsom administration’s reign, acknowledging that, "the proof is in the pudding."

ZERO-SUM GAME


San Francisco’s strong bicycle advocacy culture, the creation of lots of new bike lanes between 2000 and 2004, and innovations like Critical Mass and the sharrow (a painted arrow on the road indicating where bikes should safely ride) made this city a leader in the bicycling movement.

Yet it is only in the last few years, when San Franciscans have been sidelined by the injunction, that the movement really gained mainstream political acceptance and begun to make inroads into the dominant car culture of the United States, slowly and belatedly following the lead of European cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

"Interest in bike-friendly policies is surging, along with the growing number of adults who are riding more. Moreover, the movers and shakers of the biking scene are often smart, always passionate, and they believe strongly in what they are doing. Even when such groups are in the minority, they often enjoy significant political success, and they should never be discounted," J. Harry Wray, a political science professor from DePaul University in Chicago, argues in his new book Pedal Power: The Quiet Rise of the Bicycle in American Public Life (Paradigm, 2008).

Jeffrey Miller, executive director of Thunderhead Alliance, a national umbrella organization supporting regional bicycle advocacy groups, told us he’s pleased with the movement’s progress in recent years.

"There’s been an awakening by the decision-makers in both government and businesses that bicycling and walking can solve a lot of the environmental problems we’re facing," Miller said.

He cited Portland, Ore., Chicago, Seattle, Washington DC, and New York as the cities leading the way in prioritizing bicycling and creating systems that encourage the use of bikes, and said he was sad to see the setbacks in San Francisco.

"But advocates in each of those cities will say there’s so much more work to be done," Miller said.

Most of that work centers on changing how drivers and planners think about cities, and especially with those who see the competition for space as a zero-sum game. Miller noted that it’s good for motorists when more people are encouraged to opt for alternate forms of transportation.

"If you just get 10 to 20 percent of the drivers to use those other modes, it frees the freeways up for cars as well," Miller said. "I don’t see why we go out of our way to favor cars over every other form of transportation."

Like many advocates, he said a strong and consistently supportive mayor is crucial to change the priorities in cities.

"We have an executive leader in Mayor Daley who believes strongly that the bicycle is a big part of the solution to our environmental problems," said Rob Sadowsky, director of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation.

"We have an incredible partnership with the city," he said, noting that the organization often works directly on city contracts to create more bicycle facilities, something that happens in other bike-friendly cities like Portland and New York. But it doesn’t happen much in San Francisco.

"There’s a real sense that we’ve turned a critical corner and things that we’re been fighting for, for years now, are in sight," said Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives in New York. "In the last year, there have been some significant policy advances."

Like Mayor Daley in Chicago, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has become a vocal advocate of green transportation alternatives and has been willing to stand firm against displaced drivers.

"Anything you give to cyclists is basically taken away from automobiles," White said, adding that New York officials "have not shied away from taking parking away, or even a lane on Ninth Avenue. And that shows how serious they are."

The problem isn’t just San Francisco’s, but California’s as well. It is the state’s decades-old California Environmental Quality Act that was used to stall the Bike Plan and make bike projects so cumbersome. Sadowsky said bike projects in Chicago are relatively easy to implement, with little in the way of hearings or environmental studies needed.

Oregon laws also helped make Portland a national leader, with a requirement that all new road construction include bike lanes, paid for with state funds. Yet here in the small, 49-mile square that is San Francisco, with ideal weather and a deeply ingrained bike community, many say the city could be on the verge of regaining its leadership role in the bicycle policy.

A poll conducted in November 2007 by David Binder Research found that 5 percent of residents use a bicycle as their main mode of transportation, and that 16 percent of San Franciscans ride a bike at least once a week. Even more encouraging is the fact that most reasons cited for not biking — not enough bike lanes or parking, bad roads, feeling threatened by cars — are all things that can be addressed by smart bike policies.

"If it’s going to happen anywhere, it’s going to happen in San Francisco — as far as making more bicycling a reality," Gajda told us. "I really feel like we’re poised after the injunction to take it to the next level."

GET INVOLVED

The SFMTA has a series of upcoming workshops on the city’s Bike Plan and network:

Central Neighborhoods May 21, 6–7:30 p.m., SoMa Recreation Center Auditorium, 270 Sixth St.

Southeastern Neighborhoods May 22, 6–7:30 p.m., Bayview Anna E. Warden Branch Library, 5075 Third St.

Western Neighborhoods June 3, 6–7:30 p.m., Sunset Recreation Center Auditorium, 2201 Lawton.

Northern Neighborhoods June 4, 6–7:30 p.m., Golden Gate Valley Branch Library, 1801 Green.

BIKE TO WORK DAY, MAY 15

Biking is easier and more fun than many people realize, so Bike to Work Day is the perfect excuse to try it on for size. There will be energizer stations all over town for goodies and encouragement, and lots of fellow cyclists on the road for moral support, including group rides leaving 11 different neighborhoods at 7:30 a.m. After work, swing by the SFBC’s Bike Away from Work party from 6–10 p.m. at the Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell St. For more details, visit http://www.sfbike.org/

Yo, bangerz: Rave it tecktonik

-
2

In this week’s Super Ego clubs column, I finally take on the banger scene’s hardcore electro glitz riot on the city’s dance floors. The sound and style originated in France, mostly, and is helping to resuscitate the much-maligned term “euro” — commonly associated with over-caffeinated, hyper-sugary tunes that fitted really awful embroidered jeans and Gucci knockoff sunglasses on a couple generations of appletini swillers. I’m much more into the new euro, needless to say, and in Paris at least, bangers are associated with a dance craze, tecktonik (also spelled tektonik). Here’s what it looks like, to the wonderfully banged-up tune of fabulous French rapstress-chanteuse Yelle‘s “A Cause de Garcons.” (Her show here at the Independent last month was off the hook, btw, and she featured a sequined pink Stephen Sprouse-like dress reading “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Fierceness!)

 

 

Goofy, but sweetly energetic. The dance in fact originally started in the early-mid 2000s, in Parisian megaclub Metropolis, where it was performed to a much harder sound, a direct descendant of rave music: much more trancey and happy hardcore. (It’s said the term “tecktonik” actually refers to the clash of hardcore dance styles coming in from Belgium and the Netherlands then, crashing into each other like techtonic plates.) The two somewhat over-it-looking white dancers in the Yelle video above are famous lookalike tektoniquistes VaVan and TreAxy — household names in France. Here’s a video of them performing an early version of the dance, called “jumpstyle” (some still prefer to call it that, others use the name to refer to the music) and done to a “more traditional” musical style — you can really see the liquid rave-dance origins here, and yeah, it looks more than a tad ridiculous, but why not? There’s a reason for the term “jumpstyle.” Also happening at the time — around 2005ish, as with all underground phenomena the timing is fuzzy — and in the same clubs, but to more amped-up happy hardcore, was a revival of the Melbourne Shuffle, an old rave dance from the early ’90s that really only looks good when you do it in extraordinarily baggy pants. The “shufflers” often squared off with, or at least disassociated themselves from, the tight-pantsed “jumpers.” (In my head, they’re like the Jets and the Sharks.) Also, despite its name, “jumping” is much more about the upper body and random skips, whereas “shuffling” is all about lower glide. Here’s the Melbourne Shuffle: So, OK, what does any of this have to do with Justice, and the Ed Banger Records scene and sound?

Electronic Arabic: Jef Stott gets worldly at Bollyhood

-
0

By Vanessa Carr

Jef Stott has been a producer and remixer on San Francisco’s global electronica scene for over a decade. But this Saturday night (5/10) at Bollyhood in the Mission, Stott celebrates the release of his first full-length album – Saracen – on Six Degrees .

stottA.jpg

Stott fuses Arabic and Turkish rhythms with both electronic and acoustic beats and textures. What sets him apart from many of his world music peers is that – rather than merely sampling – Stott is a multi-instrumentalist who plays a wide range of instruments. On Saracen, he plays oud (Arabic lutes), saza and cumbus (Turkish lutes), the Persian santur, bass, and percussion. He also invites a number of guest musicians, including well-known Tunisian vocalist MC RAI.

Stellamara, whose blend of Middle Eastern and Balkan sounds and ambient rock awakened his interest in the devotional aspects of music beyond its entertainment value and led him to intensively study the oud under internationally known musicians Hamza El Din and Omar Faruk Tekbilek.

saracen.jpg

What is especially remarkable about Stott is his humility, reverence for his teachers and peers, and willingness to talk and think deeply about issues of cultural appropriation in world music.

SFBG: You have a background in heavy metal and art rock. When did you get interested in playing Middle Eastern music?

Jef Stott: [Playing in Stellamara] is when I made the big switch. That is when I picked up the oud, sold all my electric guitar equipment, and really got deeply interested in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish music. I almost abandoned everything I had done up to that point and started on a whole new path.

Hot Jew-on-Jew action

-
0

We’re getting word of a big standoff going on right now at San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center on California Street, where 30 Jewish activists protesting Israel’s policy toward Palestinians have blockaded the doors during an event celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel. Police have reportedly shown up on the scene of the “No Time to Celebrate” protest, which also includes another 40 or so Jewish and Palestinian supporters, and arrests are expected.

Mayor Gavin Newsom just returned from a trip to Israel, where he told The Jerusalem Post that much of the criticism by Bay Area residents of Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians and its longstanding military occupation of parts of Syria, Lebanon and Egypt was simply anti-Semitism, something these Semitic anti-war activists just might take issue with.

Go Daddy-o

-
0

CULT FILM STAR Veteran actor Robert Viharo apparently doesn’t like talking about the shlockier stuff in his résumé. Of which there is a lot — although maybe no more than typical for any long-term Hollywood player who didn’t reach that plateau where one can be picky.

For each prestigious film he was involved in — Romero (1989) with Raul Julia, television’s Evita Perón (1981) with Faye Dunaway, even 1967’s endlessly campy but hugely popular (even before gay people were invented) Valley of the Dolls — there were gigs of lesser repute. He guest-starred in network series from good (Hill Street Blues, The Fugitive, Kojak) to iconically beyond-good-and-evil (Dark Shadows, The Mod Squad, Starsky and Hutch, The A-Team). He appeared in independent features both cool — notably Over-Under, Sideways-Down, SF collective CineManifest’s forgotten agitprop 1977 feature — and crappy. The following year in The Evil, he got electrocuted by Victor Buono as a cackling Satan.

Ironically, the very private Los Angeles resident’s son is East Bay "Thrillville" impresario Will Viharo, a man who looooves his retro shlock. Expressing filial affection — if perhaps not exactly as dad might prefer — Will "The Thrill" presents two of pop’s prime ’70s big-screen vehicles in a Thrillville "Papa-Palooza" at Oakland’s Parkway. Neither assignment likely thrilled a Lee Strasberg–trained Actor’s Studio protégé who had hoped his career would turn out more Brando and less CHiPs. But they’re both fun throwbacks that he brings considerable presence to.

Return to Macon County (1975) has him as a Georgia cop in pursuit of hot-rodders who royally ticked him off: then-unknowns Nick Nolte (Bo) and Don Johnson (Harley). This quasi-sequel to the 1974 hicksville hit Macon County Line (which featured Max "Jethro" Baer Jr. as Viharo’s equivalent) is a larkier affair, all ’50s nostalgia, wacky car chases, homoerotic undercurrents (when Bo gets a girlfriend, Harley bridles), and dialogue like so: "Arright, skin ‘er on back, Jack, and don’t talk back!"

Viharo got the too-rare chance to carry a movie in 1977’s Bare Knuckles. Los Angeles bounty hunter Zachary Kane, clad in shiny leather and tight denim throughout, is friendly-to-flirty with every street denizen, including tranny hookers — yet he kicks snarling leatherman ass in a gay bar scene. Message: sure he’s hep, but still a man, muthablowahs! (Even if in private moments he assumes the lotus position to play the flute.) Kane rescues a mistress (Sherry Jackson) from her abusive sugar daddy … in a Pizza Hut parking lot, no less. Naturally she ends up menaced by the ladykiller (Michael Heidt) Kane is hunting down, psycho son of a Hollywood socialite mother ("Bring me another double Bloody!") resented both for commencing and ceasing incestuous relations.

Thespian (Gidget Goes Hawaiian, Green Acres) turned occasional director (1975’s Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS) Don Edmonds here combines blaxploitation-style action with proto-slasher horror. But the centerpiece is Viharo Sr. With frizzy ‘do, thick ‘stache, and middling fitness (despite a training montage), he’s like a more realistic Looking for Mr. Goodbar take on Burt Reynolds, then riding high on big-budget versions of Bare Knuckles and Macon County. Kane is hardboiled sexy ("I’m in a rough business! I don’t need a woman tellin’ me how to do it!"), but you’d best get an STD check after sharing that hot tub.

Robert Viharo ditched commercial gigs by the early ’90s, eventually finding worthy screen work again in Rob Nilsson’s improv-based "9@Night" series, which premiered in recent years at the Mill Valley Film Festival. With tenderness and rage, he plays the homeless Malafide, who as much as any character connects all nine films together. The whole cycle is expected to play Bay Area theatres this fall, an occasion the actor might even be willing to comment on.

But don’t expect him to show up for "Papa-Palooza," where his vintage visage shares the bill with the live Twilight Vixen Revue.

"PAPA-PALOOZA"

Thurs/8, 7:30 p.m., $10

Parkway

1834 Park Blvd, Oakl

(510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

Obligatory video game outrage

-
2

› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION At this point, the outraged response to the latest installment in the Grand Theft Auto series of video games, GTA4, is pretty much obligatory. Mothers Against Drunk Driving is lobbying to get the video game rated "adults only" (effectively killing it in the US market, where major console manufacturers won’t support AO games) because there’s one scene in the game where you have the option to drive drunk. Apparently none of the good ladies of MADD have ever played GTA, since if they had they might have discovered that when you try to drive drunk, the video game informs you that you should take a cab. If you do drive, the cops immediately chase you down. Which is exactly the sort of move you’d expect from this sly, fun game, which hit stores last week.

GTA, made by edgy Rockstar Games, is basically a driving game franchise packed inside an intriguing, disturbing, elaborate urban world where you become a character whose life options are all connected to the ability to drive around in various cities. Usually you’re some kind of bad guy or shady character. Think of it as the video game equivalent of a TV show like The Wire or an urban gangster flick. What has made GTA so popular among gamers is the way it combines the fun of a driving game with the sprawling possibilities of gamer choice. And I think that’s what nongamers find so confusing — and therefore threatening — about it.

When you jump into a car in GTA, you aren’t rated on your driving skill. You don’t have to stay on a predetermined track. Sure, you have to complete a mission, but you can choose to just drive around insanely, exploring the big worlds of the GTA games, beating up cops and murdering people at random if you want. You can take drugs and get superspeedy or ram a truck into a building.

GTA4 is set inside an alternate version of New York City and takes the player even further into a world of narrative choices. You play a character named Niko, a Serbian war vet who comes to Liberty City to get revenge — or to make peace with his past. Along with several other characters, he’s just trying to get by in a huge city, but gets sucked into a world of crime and murder along the way. As you get deeper into the game, you realize that your interactions with characters are just as important as running your car missions. You can’t get anywhere without making friends, connections, and plunging deeper into Niko’s troubled past.

If GTA4 were a movie, it would have been directed by Martin Scorsese or David O. Russell, and we’d all be ooohing and aaahhing over its dark, ironic vision of immigrant life in a world at war with itself. But because GTA4 is a video game, where players are in the driver’s seat, so to speak, it freaks people out. Earlier installments of GTA-inspired feminist and cultural-conservative outrage (you have the option to kill prostitutes!), and concern over moral turpitude from Hillary Clinton (you can beat cops to death! Or anybody!).

And yet there are other video games out there, like the family-friendly role-playing game The Sims, where players can torture people to death in ways far more disturbing than those in GTA. I was just talking to a friend who told me gleefully how he’d taken one of his Sims characters, stuck him in a VR headset, and walled him into a room that only contained an espresso machine. The character kept drinking coffee and playing the headset, pissing in the corners of the room and crying until he died. Other players have reported that you can stick a bunch of characters in the swimming pool, remove the ladder, and drown them. Then you can decorate your yard with their tombstones. That’s not the point of the game, but people can do it.

The reason these horrible things can happen in The Sims is exactly the same reason they happen in GTA: these are cutting-edge video games defined by player freedom rather than locking the player into a prescribed narrative loop where veering off the racetrack means "lose" rather than "find a new adventure." When you give players the option to explore their fantasies, you’re going to get some dark stuff. Yes, it’s disturbing. But it’s also the foundation of great art.

Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who has just started playing GTA4 but has already read all the spoilers for it.

Pizza Place on Noriega

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

Surfer dudes are people too, and they get hungry just like the rest of us. Surprisingly, San Francisco has such dudes; unsurprisingly, they tend to cluster at the city’s western edge, a land whose great highway is the Great Highway. Just beyond the Great Highway is the beach, pounded by surf, and surfer dudes (of any and all sexes) love the surf. Fog? This is irrelevant. Surfers have other issues to contend with, such as great whites.

The far Sunset District has its mild and fogless days, anyway — a blessing for those of us who sometimes bumble in from more sheltered corners of town, expecting the worst and swaddled in woolens — and the prosaically named Pizza Place on Noriega has been laid out with such beatific weather in mind. Although the restaurant’s glassy face peers north, its huge windows (including transoms) are filled with the light of the westering sun on spring evenings, and the woody interior (rather ski-lodgey, I thought) glows at this golden hour. Of course it rains in the Sunset too, and is foggy, and in these abysmal conditions we would have to trust to the warmth and perfume of the pizza oven, which dominates the unconcealed kitchen in its far corner of the double-width storefront space.

In my increasingly remote youth, pizza meant a visit to Shakey’s, whose amusements included a player piano. PPoN doesn’t have a player piano, but it does seem to attract small children — evidence that the city’s baby belt now extends well beyond Noe Valley. Despite the abundance of little ones, the restaurant doesn’t offer a kiddie menu; the tone throughout, in fact, seems pitched for young adults, from the jokey sign (courtesy of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer) just inside the front door — "I only eat pizza on days that end in ‘Y’" — to the huge cardboard profile of a Chevy Caprice mounted on the rear wall, with spinning tires that happen to be pepperoni pizzas.

Pabst is available on tap, which isn’t something you see too often out here, as opposed to in Milwaukee. And while the menu doesn’t offer pepperoni pizza per se, such a pie can be created from the list of DIY toppings. Pepperoni does turn up as a member of the ensemble in several of the house specialty pies, among them the Dimitri (with sausage, garlic, and mushrooms) and the Meathead (with sausage, salami, ham, and red onion).

We, however, could not resist the Spicoli ($15.99 for a 14-incher), topped with sausage and double cheese and named for — no, not an obscure pasta shape or a type of cured pork, but Jeff Spicoli, king of the surfer dudes and high priest of stoned slackerdom, as brilliantly depicted by Sean Penn in the 1982 movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The Spicoli is the simple declarative sentence of pizzadom: a nicely crisp crust that’s a bit thicker than vogue, plenty of fennel-scented sausage chunks, and a lava flow of melted cheese. I love cheese as a birthright and hesitate to say that there can be such a thing as too much of it. But, post-Spicoli, I wonder.

The kitchen also turns out some interesting side dishes, including cauliflower florets ($5) roasted with black olives, orange zest, chili flakes, and parsley for a real Mediterranean, even Sicilian, flair. Then there are the sweet potato steak fries ($7), their faint sweetness resembling the fried yucca root you sometimes find in Brazilian restaurants. To broaden their appeal, PPoN presents the fries with little cups of blue cheese dressing and buffalo sauce (tomato-based and sweet-hot, though more hot than sweet), along with piles of baby carrots and celery stalks. A family of dunkables.

And since even pizzas less cheesy than the mighty Spicoli can be overwhelming, the midday snacker can find an attractive array of sandwiches to choose from. These are called grinders and are available from noon until four in the afternoon. Perhaps their best characteristic is the bread they’re served on: torpedo-shaped, wonderfully soft rolls from Amoroso Bakery in Philadelphia.

The rolls are like focaccia rolls except not olive-oily. They’re also discreetly absorbent, an important consideration if one’s grinder is the housemade meatball version ($6.50). The meatballs themselves are veal-inflected, to judge by their subtle texture, and they’re bathed in plenty of tomato sauce, which could easily get all over everything but doesn’t because most of it settles into the bread. Some melted provolone provides an additional seal.

More complex is the uncomplex-sounding roast turkey grinder ($6.25). Plenty of meat here, along with mayo, mustard, and provolone — but also a puckery zing provided by slivers of red onion and chunks of pepperoncini. We’re a long way from sandwiches made from Thanksgiving leftovers.

As for the crowd: surfer-dudish, though a little older than Jeff Spicoli, and no sign of Sean Penn, but plenty of the aforementioned kids, dangling like chimps from chairs and the edges of tables. The surfer-dude community has discovered family values, apparently.

The pizzeria is just about a year old: a whippersnapper with sharp new wood flooring and, over the roof, a tell-tale curvy exhaust flue, in a faded part of town. It’s not yet the equal of the Richmond’s Pizzetta 211 and maybe it doesn’t mean to be. But friends and acquaintances of mine who live in the western Sunset (some surfer dudes, some regular dudes) are certainly eager for renewal in the restaurant scene — if not fast times, at least ambulatory ones.

PIZZA PLACE ON NORIEGA

Wed.–Thurs., Sun.–Mon., noon–10 p.m.

Fri.–Sat., noon–10:30 p.m.

3901 Noriega, SF

(415) 759-5752, www.pizzaplacesf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Cheerfully noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Afrolicious Anniversary

-
0

PREVIEW One of my favorite movie moments involves a big-ass cup of orange soda. It’s the opening scene of Undercover Brother (2002), when an Afro-clad Eddie Griffin navigates his drop top, burnt orange Caddy with one hand while holding his Big Gulp cup of orange soda in the other. He’s driving with the confident swag of someone who cruises the strip, filled with fruit-inspired sugar water, often. Mid-cruise, he swerves to avoid hitting something and loses control of the car. Or does he? While the car spirals in the middle of the intersection and he strong-arms the steering wheel to regain control, he holds up the orange soda to avoid any spillage. The camera pans to the miraculous survival of the soda — and the rest is history. You might wonder: what does this have to do with the one-year anniversary of Afrolicious at the Elbo Room? Nothing. Except that when I think of things that are Afrolicious and still surviving, I think of that scene, and that cup of orange soda. Alas, the weekly get-down of the African diaspora’s plethora of musical innovations is celebrating a full year of existence. Headlining the celebration is Miami’s popular Spam All Stars, whose live sets kick off the two-night party. The band is joined by DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz, and their live percussionists. Celebrate birth, revival, and the joys of springtime in the city at Afrolicious. Too bad the Elbo Room doesn’t have orange soda.

AFROLICIOUS ANNIVERSARY With Spam All Stars. Thurs/8 and Fri/9, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., $10. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. (415) 552-7788, www.elbo.com

I hear a symphony named Kimya Dawson

-
0

By Alex Felsinger

When the Moldy Peaches became increasingly popular in the ’90s, Kimya Dawson decided she wanted out. She hoped to avoid the mainstream music industry and its managers, bookers, and publicists. Her band-mate Adam Green continued within that realm, and has even been known to sell-out stadium concerts in Europe. Dawson, however, latched onto the growing global do-it-yourself punk scene, booked her own shows, and released all her albums on small, independent labels.

In the past, Dawson has always performed in smaller Bay Area venues. Two years ago, I booked a show for her at a Haight Street coffee house that could barely seat 40 people, but it was canceled at the last minute along with the rest of her tour.

Then Juno happened. It put Dawson back in the spotlight, even more than before. Her last stop in the Bay Area, at 924 Gilman Street, reflected an attempt to hold on to her underground ethos. But when it sold out in less than an hour, it was clear (at least for the time being) that she’d outgrown the facilities that the Bay Area punk scene has to offer.

So, a couple months later, what was the next logical step? Maybe the Independent? Slim’s? Nope — Dawson was asked to play the Herbst Theatre. Yes, the famous seated venue where the United Nations Charter was signed in 1945, a place typically reserved for classical music performances, theater, and dance.

kimya1.jpg
A spoonful of Kimya Dawson helps the Juno hype go down

But Dawson’s down-to-earth demeanor turned the room’s paneled mosaics into finger paintings and shortened the figurative distance from seat-to-stage to mere feet. She knew that she was out of place, and she didn’t mind saying so. “I’ve never played a show in the Bay Area that cost more than five dollars,” she said to the crowd, who’d paid $20 per ticket. “Next time, it’ll be free.”

Unfreeze my tableaux

-
0

REVIEW Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation’s epic 2006 video opera The Rape of the Sabine Women is a sprawling and beguiling reinterpretation of classical myth, art history, and film-as-sculpture. Working improvisationally on the scale of a Cecil B. DeMille production, Sussman — no relation to this critic — and her international cast and crew unfreeze Peter Paul Rubens’ and Jacques-Louis David’s grand historical tableaux of the oft-painted episode from Rome’s founding, in which the women of the Sabine tribe, having been abducted by Roman men, persuade their captors and rescuers to lay down their arms.

Sussman’s retelling swaps Italy for Greece and loosely swathes this antiquarian narrative in mid-century cool. The Roman men — in skinny suits befitting Cold War spies — brood within the desolate classicism of Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. After an exhilarating abduction scene crosscut amid the stalls of Athens’ meat market, the Sabine women lounge around a modern seaside bungalow like so many extras from an Antonioni film. But while love — or the Stockholm syndrome — saved the day and ensured the future of empire in the original story, Sussman’s far more ambiguous finale lingers on the costs of such an intervention. While the film is visually arresting and at times even exhausting, Jonathan Bepler’s stunning score — composed of echoing coughs, scuffed museum floors, the rhythmic fall of butchers’ knives on wood, shimmering clouds of bouzoukis, and the final tidal wave of a swelling 800-person choir — interacts with the images in a way that gives unexpected heft and affective depth to the constant stream of eye candy. Expect an immersive experience at the piece’s San Francisco Museum of Modern Art premiere as cast and choir members — and that fleet of bouzouki players — create a live extension of the film’s soundtrack.

THE RAPE OF THE SABINE WOMEN Opening screenings and performances Thurs/1–Fri/2, 8 p.m., $15–$20; screening and panel discussion Sun/3, 3 p.m., $7–$10; screenings May 9–June 27, 3 p.m., free with museum admission. Phyllis Wattis Theater, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St, SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

Future blaps

-
0

› superego@sfbg.com

>>Lazer Sword sizzles — read the interview

>>Lazer bass-ics: view the vids

SUPER EGO The Millennials have landed on the dance floors, and they come bearing lazers. Electro bangers are raving tecknotik. The blipswitch just got flicked. Hard is the new soft is the new pink is the new blog.

Stay with me, I got breakfast.

The past few years have seen the largest graduating classes in US history, and fresh, fizzy kids are flooding Clubland. They’re cranking full-tilt volume and lobe-throbbing loops, tinged with aggressive glamour. Good for them. A little hyperactive angst to soundtrack that stunned gazelle look so in vogue these days seems perfect for the new electorate. The next few Super Ego columns are gonna get wonky on the youthful nightlife sounds and styles already exploding for summer, so push up your super-flat Takahashi Murakami bifocals, slip on a virtual mindpod, and let’s get kinetic. I’m a hype machine!

First up: Canada. No shit. The Great no-longer-so-White North’s on fire right now, following its recent indie rock onslaught with a tide of dance music innovation. Somehow, dubstep’s abstract rhythmic dynamics, the paranoid wooze of crunk, and the ghosts of the unjustly smacked-down ’90s glitch and IDM scenes have outsourced to Montreal, spawning a kickass, woofer-blowing bbbrrraaa-aaappp!

That’s the sound of Turbo Crunk, the MTL’s superinfluential monthly party and underground movement, which filters hip-hop thumpers through a fuzzy pair of Korgs to spit out jittery ragga and zipper-ripping beats. Last month, New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones dubbed the cataclysmic sound "lazer bass," which fits, since the prolongated sizzle of the low-end slices through your innards like a subsonic chainsaw. Live performers and remixers Megasoid, Blingmod, and Mofomatronix are a few of the Turbo Crunk prime movers, but they took their cue from the genre-bending Bounce Le Gros party thrown by totally crushable speaker-wobbler Ghislain Poirier from 2005-07. Poirier, who blew through San Francisco on tour last September and scorched many a virgin ear, records for Ninja Tune and does to dancehall riddim what labelmate Amon Tobin did to Brazilian samba more than a decade ago — chomp and warp it inside out — and there’s your Turbo family tree.

Lazer bass has originators in the states, too, especially on the West Coast. L.A. is repped by protean producer Daddy Kev, cosmic dubster Flying Lotus, and poster-boy hip-choppers Glitch Mob, a quartet of DJs and knob-fiddlers — comprising Ooah, ediT, Boreta, and Kraddy — that’s managed to appeal to both the gangsta rap and Burning Man crowds. So yeah, the apocalypse is upon us. Grab a fruity cocktail.

The Bay seems exceptionally lazerable, even though there’s no regular party yet to slice up the glow. Glitch came of age here — howdy, Kid606 — and Club Six’s sprawling techno-ragga club Surya Dub has become the epicenter for the kind of dread bass antics that lazer bass takes to a gut level. Montreal is Canada’s Silicon Valley, so the demographics of pan-global, tech-savvy immigrants and natives matches up. And despite its mechanical logistics, the lazer bass sound has a certain grinning innocence to it. These are kids whose dads turned them on to Star Wars, probably. The low-tech skronks and squelches riding high atop that neato bass blare — and those pixellated CMYK Space Invaders graphics — aren’t ironic comments, they’re a great space coaster to the electronic womb. The recent bathhouse hi-NRG, Italo disco, and minimal techno revivals shared a similar ga-ga exploration of the synth-driven mysteries of the cosmic past.

Local duo Lazer Sword, a.k.a. LL and Lando Kal, are our gunners for the scene. (Ethereal wunderboy Ghosts on Tape and trancey duo Hours of Worship deserve mention as well). LL describes what he and Lando do when they’re bent backbreakingly low over their displays as "future-blaps." Yep. The two hit hard on the hip-hop side: their bastard detonation of 50 Cent’s "I Get Money" and live robo-raze of Lil Wayne and Birdman’s "Stuntin’ Like My Daddy" torch floors, while their own stuttery blowout "Gucci Sweatshirt" (from Oakland label Pish Posh’s 2007 comp Got Howls) is a c-c-cult classic. Lazer Sword’s got an EP dropping on the B.E.A.R. label this spring, they just headlined Turbo Crunk April 26, and you can catch them twice in May. Who’s up for sonic bikini waxes?

LAZER SWORD

With XO Skeletons and VC4

Fri/2, 9 p.m., call for price

Balazo 18

2811 Mission, SF

(415) 255-7227

www.myspace.com/lazersword

GLITCH MOB

With Lazer Sword and Flying Lotus

May 9, 9 p.m.–3 a.m., $20

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 762-0151

SFIFF: Highway 51

-
0

THURS/24

• The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007) Catherine Breillat steps back from one of her bluntest provocations — 2006’s Anatomy of Hell — to deliver this barbed, intelligent adaptation of Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1851 novel. Asia Argento is heroic as the titular courtesan, a seething, powerful woman working outside bourgeoisie bounds. On the eve of his marriage to a suitably chaste maiden, Mick Jagger–lipped Ryno de Maginy (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) narrates his decades-long affair with the magnetic mistress — telling the tale to his fiancée’s grandmother, who is rapt. An intriguing cocktail of classical framing and modern malaise, The Last Mistress is Breillat’s best work in years — not least of all because of her clear affection for the material. (Max Goldberg)

7 p.m., Castro.

FRI/25

Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia, 2007) Alexandra‘s 70-something title figure (Galina Vishnevskaya) takes the laborious journey to Chechnya, where the grandson (Vasily Shevtsov) she hasn’t seen in seven years is stationed at a large army base. This latest by Russian master Sokurov isn’t exactly narrative-driven, but it’s one of his least abstract, most emotionally direct works. In her first film role, opera veteran Vishnevskaya doesn’t need to sing to etch a character whose long-suffering indomitableness is Mother Courage as Mother Russia. (Dennis Harvey)

7 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, noon, Kabuki; May 4, 4:15 p.m., Pacific Film Archive

• Black Belt (Shunichi Nagasaki, Japan, 2007) Hai karate! Ably armed with authentic martial arts aces in lead roles, auteur Nagasaki transforms his masterful piece of genre filmmaking into a parable, set on the eve of World War II, about the use of power and the wisdom of passive resistance. Black Belt trounces typical CG kung fu: that the actors are karate masters gives the film a texture of authenticity unseen since the days of Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan, lending weight to thoughts and deeds. (Kimberly Chun)

8:45 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki

Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, England, 2007) Adapted from Monica Ali’s 2003 novel, Brick Lane is a clichéd, romantic, finding-one’s-home story. Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) submits herself to the unexciting life of pre-arranged marriage until she meets Karim (Christopher Simpson), who sweeps her off her feet. One of the most aggravating things about the film is that Nazneen finds the power to take charge of her life through her affair alone. Apparently her daughter’s constant plea for Nazneen to start verbalizing her will was of secondary importance. (Maria Komodore)

7:15 p.m., Kabuki.

• The Golem with Black Francis (Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, Germany, 1920) An original score composed and played live by the Pixies’ leader is a mighty enticement, but even without it this classic 1920 German silent would be worth seeing. Drawn from medieval Jewish folklore, it tells of a rabbi’s creation of a clay man to protect the ethnic ghetto from a Christian emperor’s heavy hand. Codirected by Wegener, one of the masters of cinematic German expressionism (who also plays the golem), it’s an impressive, strikingly designed mix of horror, history, and political commentary. (Harvey)

9:30 p.m., Castro.

• Just Like Home (Lone Scherfig, Denmark, 2007) Dogme95 filmmaker Scherfig hones her flair for bittersweet comedy with this goofily enjoyable ensemble piece about a misfit small town that falls into chaos. Much of the film’s story is seen through the eyes of a newcomer who has escaped from a bizarre religious cult; in accordance, Scherfig records the earnest bumbling of town folk through a unique lens, sometimes smeared with streaks of overexposed or double-exposed shapes and colors. The result is only as deep as a standard-issue Hollywood romantic comedy, but it’s deftly handled and slyly endearing. (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

6:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sat/26, 1 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/27, 4 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki

• Lady Jane (Robert Guédiguian, France, 2007) Lean and mean as a killer B-movie, Lady Jane shows that the French noir still possesses a powerful measure of chilly fire. Its namesake, played by the 50-ish, formidable, and fierce Ariane Ascaride, perfectly embodies the genre. Roused from bourgeois slumber when her son is suddenly snatched, Lady Jane reconnects with two old partners in crime to raise a ransom. Director Guédiguian is overly fond of his flashbacks but redeems himself with the care he puts into imagery that avoids Bogart-by-way-of-Belmondo clichés. (Chun)

9:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/ 27, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki

• You, the Living (Roy Andersson, Sweden/Germany/France/Denmark/Norway, 2007) There is one thing wrong with Swede Roy Andersson’s movies: there aren’t enough of them. His fourth feature in 30 years is another almost indescribable gizmo that strings together absurdist tableaux to increasingly hilarious and elaborate effect. From an incongruous Louisiana brass band to unhappy barflies forever facing last call, the characters here are comic Scandinavian-miserabilist pawns in a cosmic joke told largely through music — and painted a fugly shade of lime green. Bizarre and delightful. (Harvey)

6:15 p.m., Castro. Also Sun/27, 8:30 p.m., PFA; Tues/29, 7 p.m., Kabuki

SAT/26

Fados (Carlos Saura, Portugal/Spain, 2007) Attempting to do for the Portuguese torch song what he once did for Spain’s gypsy blues with Flamenco (1995), Saura soars and stumbles with Fados, presenting wonderful performances and a few unfortunately dated modern-dance treatments. Chico Buarque, Mariza, Lila Downs, and Césaria Évora lend their varied styles and impassioned voices to the form. But one wishes Saura would have stepped aside further for the effervescent, soulful lilt of Caetano Veloso; the plush, liquid tones of Lura; the arch, curled-lip warble of Ana Sofia Varela; and old world narrative grace of Carlos do Carmo. (Chun)

2:45 p.m., Castro. Also Mon/28, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki

Ice People (Anne Aghion, USA/France, 2007) The movies have long made the Antarctic the terrain of terrifying monsters and cute creatures, but the beings discovered by Anne Aghion in this documentary bare fatigue, not fangs, and they are far more prickly than cuddly. Aghion’s portrait of the inhabitants of the McMurdow Research Station spends most of its time with a satellite group of four geologists looking for 20-million-year-old leaf fossils. There’s more depth in the fantastic landscapes, which Aghion lenses far more flatteringly than she does her human subjects. (Sussman)

6:45 p.m., Kabuki. Mon/28, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki

Mataharis (Icíar Bollaín, Spain, 2007) Charlie’s Angels this ain’t: these investigators and would-be Mata Haris of an all-female Madrid detective agency have the unwashed hair, sensible shoes, and bad marriages of everyday wage slaves. Actress-director Bollaín’s skillful, empathetic knack for capturing the grubby, low-light details of working women’s lives glimmers through the pale haze of this promising film. But she falters with the application of narrative-flattening sentiment, predictably reassuring story arcs, and the occasional cheesy slo-mo effect. (Chun)

4 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/28, 7:15 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 9 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 1:15 p.m., Clay

Walt & El Grupo (Theodore Thomas, USA, 2007) In 1941, Walt Disney and a band of animators, writers, and other artists — which came to be known as El Grupo — journeyed to South America on a goodwill tour. This documentary, codirected by the son of one voyager, gathers wonderful photos, home movies, and a dazzling collection of drawings and cartoon clips to re-create the trip. The trouble is that there’s no real drama. The cumulative view is as sharply Eurocentric as Disney’s was when he went on to make cartoons such as 1942’s Saludos Amigos. (Anderson)
1:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/28, 6 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 12:30 p.m., Kabuki

SUN/27

• Forbidden Lie$ (Anna Broinowksi, Australia, 2007) Norma Khouri made headlines and toured the talk show and lecture circuit as a crusading heroine when her 2003 international bestseller Forbidden Love highlighted the phenomenon of honor killings in pockets of the Muslim world. Trouble was, her heartrending story turned out to be a fabrication. As filmmaker Anna Broinowski grows increasingly exasperated with her subject’s fibbing and evasiveness, this documentary develops from an exposé into a portrait of a serial con artist one would be quite happy to see writing her next book from behind bars. (Harvey)

1:30 p.m., PFA. Also April 30, 12:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 6:30 p.m., Clay; May 4, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki

• Picking Up the Pieces (various, 2007) The most intriguing piece in this shorts program about things lost and found is Death Valley Superstar, Michael Yaroshevsky’s half-hour documentary focusing on Marc Frechette, who was picked off the street to star in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 Zabriskie Point. Taking his role as a student revolutionary into real life, he subsequently tried robbing a bank, was arrested, and died in prison under suspicious circumstances. Also excellent is Radu Jude’s 25-minute Romanian drama Alexandra and John Magary’s The Second Line, a narrative revolving around a FEMA worker in post-Katrina New Orleans. (Harvey)

11:45 a.m., Kabuki. Also April 30, noon, Kabuki.

A Stray Girlfriend (Ana Katz, Argentina, 2007) Writer-director-actress Katz maps out post-breakup transience with a wandering handheld camera and oblique dialog. As her titular character explores a rural township on Argentina’s coast, each scene teeters between bewilderment and menace. Lynne Ramsay covered similar terrain in her minor masterpiece Morvern Callar (2002), though with a dream-inducing soundtrack and enigmatic ellipticism far beyond Katz’s more vanilla approach. (Goldberg)

9:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 1, 7:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 6:15 p.m., PFA

MON/28

• Cachao: Uno Más (Dikayl Rimmasch, USA, 2008) Actor, would-be bongo player, and Cuban music fanatic Andy Garcia does right by his idol, the late Cuban musical great Israel "Cachao" Lopez, in this passionate tribute sprinkled with SF sights and centered around a Bimbo’s 365 Club concert. The show was apparently a hot one — it also showcased Bay Area Latin music scholar John Santos, timbalero Orestes Vilato, and vocalist Lazaro Galarraga — and director Rimmasch does it justice by using the performance as a narrative framework for a history that parallels that of contemporary Cuban music. (Chun)

6:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki.

TUES/29

Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, USA, 2008) After profiling Robert McNamara in 2003’s The Fog of War, Morris jumps down the chain-of-command to summon US soldiers punished for the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib. Ever the showman, he cuts from burnished interviews and photos to reenactments and slow-motion rumbles — we "see" Saddam’s egg frying, giant prison ants, and an exploding helicopter. Such obsessive visualizations seem misplaced and morally confused. The Abu Ghraib story is, among other things, about the unstable, delicate nature of photographic representation. Yet Morris can’t resist auteur-stamped fireworks — how else to explain the typically nutty (and utterly incongruous) Danny Elfman score? (Goldberg)

Part of "Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award: An Evening With Errol Morris," 7:30 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Color her deadly

-
0

It’s a mug’s game determining the correct genre of John M. Stahl’s 1945 Leave Her to Heaven — especially since a true shorthand pitch should dodge the question entirely to note instead that it contains at least one, and arguably two, of the most unsettling murder scenes in movie history. Stahl’s adaptation of a million-selling potboiler by Ben Ames Williams is both a film noir and a melodrama. But even those two genres scarcely cover its facets: it’s also a revealing antecedent to some of Alfred Hitchcock’s most esteemed or idiosyncratically baroque suspense films.

Modern-day responses to Leave Her to Heaven often invoke melodrama yet rarely explore the ironic historical relationship between Stahl and Douglas Sirk, the oft-worshipped master of that genre’s ’50s Technicolor peak. It was Stahl who — between 1934 and 1935 — directed the original black-and-white versions of two crucial volumes in the Sirk library, Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Imitation of Life (1959). Because Leave Her to Heaven predates the first of those remakes by close to a decade, it’s safe to assume that Sirk took a look at Stahl’s movies and liked what he saw. Many Sirk trademarks — an uncharacteristically dramatic use of shadow within Technicolor; a fondness for otherworldly shades of blue evening light; staging that heightens the artificiality of mid-20th century American society; set decoration that turns dream homes into prisons — are to the fore of Leave Her to Heaven.

The harsh visual symbolism one associates with Sirk is also present in Stahl’s most famous movie. Disabled young Danny (Darryl Hickman) is first glimpsed by viewers and by Ellen (Gene Tierney) with his eyes closed in slumber. Later in the film, when another character’s offhand remark gives Ellen the idea to become pregnant, a staircase looms behind her. These foreboding touches are the type of morbid rewards that await anyone who returns to Leave Her to Heaven after experiencing the film’s strange mix of slack stretches and stunning moments a first time.

A unique tension stems from one aspect of Leave Her to Heaven that separates Stahl’s movie from the cinema of Sirk: Stahl gives his anti-heroine Ellen an almost mythic power that even infects the film’s nature scenes, which are so eye-piercingly vibrant they verge on surrealism. At one point glimpsed through binoculars like an approaching enemy in a war film, Ellen’s family are too intimidated by her to enforce suffocating social niceties or break free from them. Instead, they alternately resemble statues or nervous animals that sense the presence of a predator. Ellen meets her soon-to-be husband Richard (Cornel Wilde) at high altitudes on that favorite Hitchcock existential vehicle, a train. His (and Stahl’s) love-at-first-sight gaze into her green eyes — and a later scene in which Ellen rises from beneath green waters — has the uncanny doomed allure that Hitchcock somehow sustained throughout 1958’s still-matchless Vertigo. (A notorious scene from 1981’s Mommie Dearest also tips its bathing cap to Ellen’s swim.)

A place in 20th century film history is a rich reward for Leave Her to Heaven. When Ellen rides horseback through New Mexico’s arid landscape at dawn, coldly tossing her father’s ashes to and fro before hurling the urn with true abandon, the wild horses psychodrama of Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) steeplechase-jumps through a film buff’s mind. The symbolism of a high-strung woman riding a horse isn’t unique to those films, but in his adaptation of Winston Graham’s 1961 novel, Hitchcock even goes so far as to echo, with a slight reversal, Leave Her to Heaven‘s competitive relationship between Ellen and her adopted cousin — "not my sister," she makes clear — Ruth (Jeanne Crain).

Leave Her to Heaven is a true downer — and feel free to add an extra r to that description. In the 1967 survey Films and Feelings, critic Raymond Durgnat cites it as an example of its era’s penchant for "tightlipped misogyny," suggesting Durgnat wasn’t a film noir fanatic or a Freudian. The movie’s melodrama is classically cruel in the Joan Crawford tradition, built on a story almost sadistically entwined with the lead actress’s autobiography. A year or two before shooting, Tierney gave birth to a deaf, blind daughter after contracting measles from someone whom, years later, she discovered was a fan. The film’s screenplay grazes this experience with a reference to the mumps — watch Ellen tense up and turn ice-cold when it occurs — and through the character of Danny. If Ellen is one of filmdom’s most tragic characters, aspects of Tierney’s real life miseries are more unsettling. She underwent shock treatment at least 27 times.

Not exactly funny — and yet there is a truly hilarious coda to Leave Her to Heaven‘s story. In 1988, the same scenario was remade as TV movie Too Good to Be True, with a lineup too amazing to be believed: Loni Anderson plays the Ellen role, with Patrick Duffy from Dallas as her long-suffering husband, Neil Patrick Harris from Doogie Howser, M.D. as swim-happy Danny, and Julie Harris, a Baldwin brother (Daniel), and Larry "Dr. Giggles" Drake rounding out the cast. If that weren’t enough, the teleplay goes so far as to exaggerate the original’s most vicious scene by turning what looks like a rescue attempt from above the surface into an act of murder underwater.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN Sat/26, Castro, and Sun/27, PFA.

>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Critic’s choice

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

SFIFF J. Hoberman — trenchant weekly critic, book author, programmer, teacher — is celebrating his 30th year at the Village Voice, an unheard-of stretch for a film writer. (Pauline Kael’s famous tenure at the New Yorker lasted 23 years.) Freshly garlanded with a three-week program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and an Anthology Film Archive screening of his early forays in experimental filmmaking, Hoberman continues his prize tour with this year’s Mel Novikoff Award.

The recent programs at BAM and Anthology highlight attributes that made Hoberman an essential buttress against the sycophantic rivalries flowing from Kael’s 1960s showdowns with Andrew Sarris. Over the phone from his New York office, Hoberman told me about his early days at the Voice: "I created a beat of things the other critics weren’t particularly interested in, and that took in a lot of stuff. Originally they had brought me on to write about avant-garde and experimental film, but pretty soon I was writing about documentary, animation, revival series, foreign films that weren’t from France … all kinds of things."

Hoberman’s BAM program was accordingly unwieldy, covering Andrei Rublev (1969) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Ernie Gehr and Martin Scorsese. Cinephilia Hoberman-style seems to be everywhere at once, encompassing Looney Tunes, No Wave New York, Jeanne Dielman (1975) and Yiddish cinema. It’s eclecticism with a program, matched by a willingness to chase the rabbit down its hole — but never at the expense of analytical rigor.

Although Hoberman is a professed admirer of the puzzling jazz in Manny Farber’s criticism, his prose is solidly explicatory and instructive. He knows how to open a discussion: "In its tireless attempts to mean everything to everyone and empirical willingness to try anything once, the American culture industry intermittently generates its own precursors, parallels, and analogues to local or European avant-gardism." He’s an apt profiler: "Pain and Fear — and the convulsive desire for public recognition — are Scorsese’s meat." And he’s not afraid to take a stand, as with a recent rave for David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007): "From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005), neither Scorsese nor Spielberg, and not even David Lynch, has enjoyed a comparable run."

He’s also an accomplished facilitator of Jean-Luc Godard’s idea that the history of cinema is synchronous with the history of the 20th century. We can count on Hoberman to connect Terror’s Advocate (2007) with La Chinoise (1967), to draw a line from a prescient film like A Face in the Crowd (1957) to Watergate and Nashville (1975). When his interests come together — as with an appreciation of Southland Tales‘ (2007) avant-gardism, midnight movie appeal, and socio-political currency — sparks still fly. Talking about an upcoming "prequel" he’s penning to his 2005 decoupage of ’60s cinema, The Dream Life (New Press), Hoberman muses, "I think that now, or at least since [Ronald] Reagan, it’s sort of customary to see movies as political scenarios." To the extent that this is true, Hoberman is due significant credit — his meditations on that movie-land president, for one, are as adroit as that of any policy wonk.

Historical markers notwithstanding, Hoberman’s film selection for his special night is likely the most unabashedly sensuous movie not starring Asia Argento to play this year’s festival. Spanish director José Luis Guerín described In the City of Sylvia (2007) as a "simple" film at last fall’s Vancouver International Film Festival, and it certainly does offer a distilled vision of cinematic paradise: gazing and grazing faces, old Strasbourg, and a slow stitch of sound and image.

Our inlet to Sylvia is a whiskered young man, haunting the city at a dreamy remove. He sits in an outdoor café with his notebook, sketching the faces of radiant women while Guerín orchestrates fractal cutting, multilevel staging of faces, and intricately gradated sound design into a sun-dappled symphony. After changing seats, the dreamer recognizes a woman sitting behind a pane of glass. She leaves and he follows, locked in an ambiguous reverie inscribed with resonant detail and sweet ambiguity.

Sylvia fulfills the cinephile’s dream of disembodiment. "It’s a narrative that comes organically from the fact of making the movie rather than dramatizing a story situation," Hoberman opines. "There’s a real love of cinema, the process of it." Each of the film’s handful of extended passages is distinct in its precise design, but this blissful lucidity Hoberman describes is Sylvia‘s central melody and romance.

Late in Guerín’s film, after a yearning bar scene set to Blondie’s "Heart of Glass," the young man sits at a tram stop, considering the waiting women and rushing window reflections for some clue as to his own loss. In a virtuosic eliding glimpse of a passing bus, Guerín dissolves the sounds and images of shots already superimposed by the panes of glass. A quick succession of several more multi-tiered, unexpectedly conversant portraits of women ("Elles," the dreamer notes in his book) finally lands on a mesmerizing rear-angle of a woman’s hair blowing wildly in the wind. The young man can’t put pencil to paper. He’s as enamored as we are with this siren song from what the director calls "the continent of cinema," a place J. Hoberman knows all too well.

AN EVENING WITH J. HOBERMAN (includes screening of In the City of Sylvia), Sun/27, 6 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA Tues/29, 4 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 9 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

6 African feasts

-
0

If there’s one thing I learned while traveling in Africa, it’s that you can never predict the sublime. With little to guide you except your nose and your gut, eating "out" usually means perching on the side of the road in front of an unprepossessing stall and entrusting your appetite’s fate to the dish of the day. Luckily it seems there’s no end to the possibilities created from a handful of humble ingredients — tomatoes, onions, legumes, and yams — and the deft talents of a multitude of unsung culinary geniuses. Even luckier, in San Francisco, traveling gastronomically around an entire continent is as easy as hopping the bus to the next neighborhood, proving that even local travel can broaden one’s horizons — not to mention waistline.

TAJINE


Ever the sentimentalist, I have been known to wax nostalgic about Tajine’s former gritty Jones Street location, which was so tiny it only had two or three tables and a bustling to-go trade among the city’s taxi drivers. But because I consciously strive to embrace change (no, really!), I am able to appreciate their newer, bigger, and admittedly more expensive Polk Gulch location. Though its menu includes kebab plates, flaky bastilles (savory phyllo dough pastries), and an array of salads, it’s the hearty, meaty, one-pot stews (tajines) that really get my tastebuds tingling.

1338 Polk, SF, (415) 440-1718, www.tajinerestaurant.com

BISSAP BAOBAB/LITTLE BAOBAB


From the national dish of Senegal (thiebou djen, a tilapia-based stew, served with red rice) to the regional specialties of yapou khar (a melt-in-your-mouth lamb dish from the city of Thiès) and yassa chicken from Casamance, Bissap Baobab dishes up pan-Senegalese cuisine with friendly flair. The not-to-be missed drinks, mixed with bissap (hibiscus), ginger, and tamarind juices inspire smooth (and otherwise) moves on the dance floor of Little Baobab once the tables have been pushed away and the rotating lineup of DJs comes out to play at 10 p.m.

2323 Mission, SF. (415) 826-9287

3388 19th St., SF. (415) 643-3558

www.bissapbaobab.com

AXUM CAFÉ


The axis of the San Francisco Ethiopian restaurant "scene" for many years, Axum Café serves a fine, spicy kifto (Ethiopia’s version of steak tartare), tender lamb tibsie, and an array of vegetarian options that would make even a diehard carnivore’s mouth water. Tucked behind an unpretentious facade on Haight Street, what Axum might lack in slickster glamour it more than makes up for with its solid menu and neighborhood-friendly prices. Plus, you can mistake their injera for a tablecloth — it’s that big (though much tastier).

698 Haight, SF. (415) 252-7912, www.axumcafe.com

A TASTE OF AFRICA


If you’ve come down, as I’ve been known to, with a persistent craving for fufu and egusi soup, you’ll be relieved to know that your hankering can be satisfied at A Taste of Africa without having to jump on the next plane to West Africa. This cheerful Cameroonian establishment also serves steamed corn koki (call ahead for availability) and a variety of savory vegetable dishes and meat stews. For an even more accurate taste of Africa, their food truck at the Ashby BART flea market definitely reminds me of the open air food stalls where I sampled so many of these dishes the first time around.

3015 Shattuck and Ashby BART station, Berk. (510) 981-1939

NEW ERITREA RESTAURANT


Though the cuisines are virtually identical, you don’t want to confuse Eritrea for Ethiopia in polite company. Still, for those who love their Ethiopian restaurant experiences, the drill at New Eritrea Restaurant will be familiar. Receive platters of flavorful food, plunge in sans silverware, and chase with copious amounts of Harar beer or steamed milk with honey. For the frugal and adventurous alike, they offer the familiar vegetarian sampler platter and a less usual meat one, plus three varieties of sambusas (stuffed East African fritters).

907 Irving, SF. (415) 691-1288

TROPICAL PARADISE


I love eating out in Berkeley period. You never have to stand in hipster hell waiting for admittance to food heaven, even on weekends. And for my money, as far as heavenly goes, you can’t beat the Ghanaian grub at Tropical Paradise. Try the tastiest fried plantains in the Bay, served piping hot alongside delicately seasoned black-eyed peas — a deceptively simple dish known as Red Red. The ubiquitous fermented corn dumplings (kenkey), hearty waachi, and a blood-warming "light" soup with fufu and generous portions of goat, chicken, or salmon bring Ghana to life in your mouth — especially when pleasantly washed down with a spicy sweet blend of fruit and ginger.

2021 University Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 665-4380 *

Eat these queens’ meats

-
0

It’s time to raise a knife and spoon to end AIDS, as restaurants throughout our fair berg are flooded on the evening of Thurs/24 for Dining Out For Life — a benefit in which 25 percent of all food and drink sales will be donated to StopAIDS. Oh yes, there will be drag queens. Perhaps even breaded and baked. Below are three choice happenings hosted by thirsty trannies aching to shove their meat in your mouth. Reservations strongly encouraged (Click here for 100 more participating restaurants!)

The Crispy Classic
juanitaa.jpg
Miss Juanita More dishes out her famous fried chicken with honey goo (plus carrot cake dessert!) at Mars Bar. her scrumptious (and possibly underaged) More Boys will wait on you, hostess Candi Gurl will look stunned but glamorous, and DJ James Glass –= the hottest straight boy into underground disco — will help it all go down easy.

5-9pm
Mars Bar
798 Brannan, SF
(415) 621-MARS

******************************************************

The Skewered Newbie
monistatb.jpg
No one skewers the reigning queens of the scene like Monistat — so appropriately she’ll be hostessing, along with Castro Shawn, at the Castro’s deliciously healthy skewered meat wonderland Asqew Grill. Don’t forget to shishkabob your hair, lady.

6pm
Asqew Grill
3583 16th St., SF
(415) 626-3040

**************************************************

Just a Plain Ol’ Saucy Mess
hunterb.jpg
The fiendishly fingerlickin’ Felicia Fellatio — pictured here with cutie leatherboy cohost Jorge — will hold glutton court at Memphis Minnie’s BBQ in Lower Haight. (Did you know that Memphis Minnie’s features a sake tasting menu with it’s plethora of roasted flesh? Well now you know!)

7pm
574 Haight, SF
(415) 864-7675
www.memphisminnies.com

PS: It’s rumored that Felicia can down a whole rack of ribs without swallowing. Here’s proof, at least, that she can down a whole racket:

012.jpg

Anyone for seconds?

Alligators, man

-
0

TOOTHY CINEMA Alligators, man. As James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Peter Pan will tell you, meeting a gator is a surefire way to add insta-peril to your script, or at least supply a pun-tastic one-liner (Arnold Schwarzenegger to recently expired gator in 1996’s Eraser: "You’re luggage!") Last year’s pseudo-political Primeval was a disappointment, and Rogue, Aussie director Greg Mclean’s follow-up to Wolf Creek (1995), never quite made it into theaters stateside. Fortunately, Mother Nature’s cuddliest predator takes center stage in a few flicks well worth your Earth Day perusal. (Note: Scientists will tell you that head shapes, saltwater tolerance, and other factors separate alligators and crocodiles. But as far as Hollywood’s concerned, same difference.)

Lake Placid (1999) Directed by Steve Miner — who helmed two Friday the 13th sequels (including the one in 3-D), C. Thomas Howell blackface classic Soul Man (1986), multiple episodes of Dawson’s Creek, and Jessica Simpson’s soon-to-be-straight-to-video Major Movie Star — Lake Placid has the advantages of an agreeable cast (Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Brendan Gleeson, and a memorably foulmouthed Betty White) and a script by Emmy darling David E. Kelley. Lake Placid doesn’t quite achieve the critter-tastic heights of 1997’s Anaconda, but it’s adequately gruesome and campy. Trivia: the made-for-TV sequel subs in Cloris Leachman for Betty White and features laughably bad special effects, as well as way more boobs than the original.

Alligator (1980) You know how New York City is supposed to have alligators in its sewers? Chicago has a similar problem. This creature-horror sorta-classic pits Robert Forster against a gator named Ramon. Alligator would double-feature well with swamp-sploitation ‘Gator Bait (1974), which features Cajuns, incest, hick-tastic accents, and quite a few slimy reptiles — most of them human.

Eaten Alive (1977) Tobe Hooper’s follow-up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) also concerns an isolated house populated by "a family of Draculas" that’s stumbled upon by Marilyn Burns, Chainsaw‘s blond screamer. But in Eaten Alive, the dwelling resembles a redneck Bates Motel, with a hungry croc lurking in muddy waters that abut its porch. Veteran tough-guy actor Neville Brand glowers atop a cast of horror notables — including Carolyn "Morticia Addams" Jones, Kyle Richards (one of the kids Laurie Strode babysits in 1977’s Halloween), and Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund.

Crocodile Dundee (1986) Granted, much of the wildlife in this film is supplied by Times Square — but you gotta love that scene where Paul Hogan brains a baddie with a can of peaches.

1...106107108...128Page 107 of 128

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org